Should ball tampering be legalised in cricket?

Darrell Hair and Inzamam-ul-Haq clash over ball tampering

In Cricket, Rule 42.3 is probably the one that’s been brought up and dissected the most number of times in all its colourful history. The famous law regarding ball-tampering states that:

“Players are barred from rubbing the ball on the ground, interfering with its seam or surface, or using any implement that can alter the condition of the ball to thereby gain unfair advantage. “

The “using any implement” may include scuffing with finger-nail or some sharp object, picking the seam or even usage of substances like lip-balm, chewing gums or Vaseline. Now this is one of the more controversial laws to have ever existed in Cricket. The first time ball-tampering was suspected in International Cricket was with John Lever in England’s 1976 tour of India. However, the matter was hushed-up.

When reverse-swing hurt England

The next known incident was that of New Zealand’s Chris Pringle who admitted to ball-tampering in Faisalabad and took career-best match-figures of 11-152 in the process. The time when the issue gained maximum limelight was in Pakistan’s famous 1992 tour of England. Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were suspected to have regularly tampered the ball to generate early and deadly reverse-swing that no other international bowler in the world at the time was capable of emulating. Ever since then, there’s been tabloids full of incidents of ball-tampering culminating with the latest row involving Vernon Philander in Sri Lanka.

The fact is that evidence of ball-tampering in cricket dates back to pre-recorded memory, in cricket. There has been a lot of cricketers (Shoaib Akhtar, Imran Khan, Mushtaq Muhammad to name a few) who have come out and said they had tampered with the ball and seen many players of their generation indulge in it. There’s definitely been many issues in domestic cricket which has not gained the limelight. There’s even been a lot of former greats – Imran Khan, Allan Donald, Richard Hadlee and others – who’ve demanded that tampering be legalized. The current nature of ambiguity regarding the law and recent Media focus has attracted a lot of debates over the topic. I’ll primarily base my views in response to these two articles on the topic.

Krishna Kumar writes for The Cordon on ESPN Cricinfo how ball-tampering should be outsourced. According to him all teams will be given a uniformly doctored, used ball at the end of 50 overs. They will be given the responsibility of maintaining that ball with proper care, till the 80th over.

Mark Nicholas on the other hand writes that both teams be allowed to tamper with the ball to the extent that they don’t use foreign substances, like – nails or bottle caps or spikes. But everything else, from gum-spit to sunscreen to picking the seam should be allowed to the bowlers in light of the fact that modern-day cricket has become too batsman-oriented.

It’s impossible to not recognise some of the merits of both lines of arguments. But Kumar’s idea has to be rejected for a number of reasons:

1. If teams are given a doctored ball, then what will we expect the doctoring to have been done through? Is it through artificial substances? Then wouldn’t it be the same as ball-tampering? Why not simply ask the players to do it?
2. If not doctored artificially, then again, what’s wrong with the ball the players and the team maintain for 50 overs?
3. The fact that certain teams are better at maintaining the condition of the ball should be their advantage over teams that are less good at it. That adds to the natural charm of cricket.
4. Certain teams with certain balls and on certain kinds of pitches are able to reverse the ball much before 50 overs. Will they be asked to simply NOT use reverse swing? Or why will they give away the ball they carefully prepared for 50 overs?

Uniformity in laws required

Despite rejecting the idea, the writer’s vision of bringing some uniformity over the laws is not a bad one at all! In fact, most of the controversies that arise today are because of the lack of uniformities. Some concrete examples would make this clearer:

In the 2005 Ashes, Marcus Trescothick (admitted later) used a special kind of gum-juice to retain the shine on the Test ball. That series became famous for Simon Jones’s and Andrew Flintoff’s notorious reverse-swing bowling that took England to victory. However in 2004, Rahul Dravid was penalized in Australia for using a cough-lozenge saliva to condition the ball!

In 2006, at The Oval, the Pakistan team was docked five penalty runs and made to change the ball in use, by Umpire Darrell Hair, because he thought the condition of it was altered. But there was no direct evidence of any of the players having tinkered with the ball. Switch over to October 2013 and South Africa’s Faf du Plessis was caught red-handed on camera ramming down the ball on his pant-zippers. He escaped with just a 50% match fee penalty. The repercussions of the Oval incident had cost Pakistan the entire Test match as a result of them having forfeited it. If these are not blatant cases of double-standards in handing out punishment, then nothing is.

There are many other varieties of non-uniformity existent in cricket. The primary one being the inequality in the contest between bat and ball. Nowadays, added to flatter wickets, the bats have become much meatier and boundaries shorter. It doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to figure out if these issues were addressed and more uniformity brought with the laws and with the implementation of laws, then many such controversies would also fall through.

Bowlers deserve more leeway

Moving over to the argument that Mark Nicholas has to offer. He makes a pretty heart-rending case for the bowlers. He suggests that the poor bowler has got nothing going for him today. Flat, covered batting wickets, fast outfields, meaty bats, shorter boundaries and short formats means the bowler has to struggle to preserve runs let alone hold any sort of wicket-taking threat or dominance over the batsman. Cricket should be a much more even contest between bat and ball! So why not legalise conditioning the ball to the extent that foreign objects are not used.

To his argument one might add that ball-tampering is such a reality in International cricket that nowadays it’s not a question of doing or not-doing it, rather it’s a question of how well a team covers it up. Therefore, conditioning of the ball can be accepted. But then, picking the seam? Surely that’s going too far. Instead make uniform laws that state, you can condition the ball in anyway, apart from picking on the seam or using foreign substances or nails.

Especially make the laws UNIFORM! It’s okay if you ram the ball down on the ground (how can you rule that a certain extent of it is natural and beyond that is cheating?) But it’s not okay to use your boot-spikes over the ball (Like Broad and Anderson did in 2010). Check cricketers for carrying coins or artificial dirt and stuff like that before they go to the ground. Get TV broadcasters involved in prying out incidents of rule-violation and give equal punishments for everyone.

Finally, as suggested by Krishna Kumar – dock the guilty team 30 penalty runs instead of five and ban the repeat offenders. Uniformise the laws, make it fair for everyone and don’t bank on the ambiguous phrase called ‘Spirit of Cricket’.